The surfaces of proteins are generally hydrophilic but there have been reports of sites that exhibit an exceptionally high affinity for individual water molecules. Not only do such molecules often fulfil critical biological functions, but also, they may alter the binding of newly designed drugs. In crystal structures, sites consistently occupied in each unit cell yield electron density clouds that represent water molecule presence. These are recorded in virtually all high-resolution structures obtained through X-ray diffraction. In this work, we utilized the wealth of data from the RCSB Protein Data Bank to train a residual deep learning model named 'hotWater' to identify sites on the surface of proteins that are most likely to bind water, the so-called water hot spots. The model can be used to score existing water molecules from a PDB file to provide their ranking according to the predicted binding strength or to scan the surface of a protein to determine the most likely water hot-spots de novo. This is computationally much more efficient than currently used molecular dynamics simulations. Based on testing the model on three example proteins, which have been resolved using both highresolution X-ray crystallography (providing accurate positions of trapped waters) as well as low-resolution X-ray diffraction, NMR or CryoEM (where structure refinement does not yield water positions), we were able to show that the hotWater method is able to recover in the "water-free" structures many water binding sites known from the highresolution structures. A blind test on a newly solved protein structure with waters removed from the PDB also showed good prediction of the crystal water positions. This was compared to two known algorithms that use electron density and was shown to have higher recall at resolutions >2.6 Å. We also show that the algorithm can be applied to novel proteins such as the RNA polymerase complex from SARS-CoV-2, which could be of use in drug discovery. The hotWater model is freely available at (https://pypi.org/project/hotWater/).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.